Josimar Medina woke a little before 9am on Wednesday to find himself airborne and hurtling through his carriage on the fast train from Madrid to Seville. He looked around and realized just how lucky he and his girlfriend, Vitoria Maia, had been. He saw people with cuts, people covered in blood, people missing limbs, and one person who had nothing left below the chest. He saw people with their heads crushed and people with mutilated arms.
The Peruvian stood recounting the details of Wednesday’s deadly rail crash wearing a light brown T-shirt stained with the blood of a young American man he had helped move to safety. Medina and Maia had been in the seventh carriage of the state-operated Renfe train that smashed into the back of a train run by the private Iryo company on the same line from the capital to the south of Spain. Had they been any further forward, they could well have been among the accident’s fatalities.
As it was, the couple climbed out of the train and helped the injured while they waited for medics and Guardia Civil officers to arrive at the scene of the crash, which took place amid vineyards and olive groves near the small town of Urda in the central region of Castilla-La Mancha, near the city of Toledo. Within hours of the crash, Urda had been transformed into a frantic emergency response centre, with a local sports centre pressed into service as a triage post for the walking wounded. Cars, vans and trucks from the emergency services in Castilla-La Mancha and neighbouring Madrid crowded the streets.
Fredrich and Arabella Barilea, a couple from the Philippines who now live in Dubai, were on the Iryo train, and Fredrich was sent flying by the impact. One guy was shouting: ‘Get out! Get out! Another train could hit!’ We saw all the people were also getting off. Many of them had head injuries and were covered in blood. We just got as far away from the train as we could.
Eventually, buses arrived to ferry the lightly injured survivors to Urda, although the Barileas said they were too shocked and confused to know where exactly they had been brought. It all happened in a split second. The table we were sitting at just disappeared in the crash. I feel like we’re on our second life. You never know what could happen. We’re very grateful.
